Literate, lucent, and well researched: a fascinating glimpse into how artists respond as the world explodes around them. (44...
Did Anton Chekhov’s niece, a major Nazi film star, spy for Mother Russia during WWII? Yes and no, concludes the author of several previous works about Soviet-German conflict.
Beevor (The Fall of Berlin, 2002, etc.) begins with a startling moment in 1945. The Germans have surrendered, the war in Europe is over, and the Moscow Art Theatre is presenting The Cherry Orchard, featuring the playwright’s aging widow in her signature role of Ranyevskaya. Taking her bows, the actress sees her niece, Nazi film queen Olga Chekhova (1897–1980), waving at her from the audience. What is she doing there? Beevor then rehearses some family history and introduces us to his other characters. Prominent among them are the playwright’s nephew, Misha Chekhov, a gifted actor briefly married to Olga, and her brother, Lev Knipper, before the war a promising composer and during the war a crafty agent and trainer of Soviet alpine forces. In 1921, the divorced Olga fled the murderous Russian civil war for Berlin, her advent coinciding nicely with the rise of German cinema. Her career skyrocketed (Beevor appends a lengthy and impressive list of her films), and she even partied with Chaplin in Hollywood. But after the Nazis took power in the 1930s, Olga found herself playing a particularly unsavory role, with Hitler, Goebbels, et al., as the creepiest of costars. She struggled throughout the war to protect herself, her career, and her family, but Beevor believes she probably did not spy much in any traditional sense, though her relatively comfortable postwar life in West Germany certainly raised eyebrows. The author knows his way around the relevant archives and had access to knowledgeable folks (he interviewed one of Olga ’s Nazi lovers), but he concludes that none of this material can provide an entire answer to the question of what services Olga might have given to the Soviets.
Literate, lucent, and well researched: a fascinating glimpse into how artists respond as the world explodes around them. (44 b&w illustrations, not seen; 1 map)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03340-5
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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